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The political career of John C. Breckinridge included service in the state government of Kentucky, the United States federal government, and the government of the Confederate States of America. In 1857, at 36 years old, he was inaugurated as James Buchanan's vice president, and remains the youngest person to ever hold the office. Four years later, he ran as the presidential candidate of a dissident group of Southern Democrats, but lost the election to the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln. A member of the Breckinridge political family, in 1849 John C. Breckinridge became the first Democrat to represent Fayette County in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and in 1851, he was the first Democrat to represent Kentucky's 8th congressional district in over 20 years. A champion of strict constructionism, states' rights, and popular sovereignty, he supported Stephen A. Douglas's Kansas–Nebraska Act as a means of addressing slavery in the territories acquired by the U.S. in the Mexican–American War. Considering his re-election to the House of Representatives unlikely in 1854, he returned to private life and his legal practice. He was nominated for vice president at the 1856 Democratic National Convention, and although he and Buchanan won the election, he enjoyed little influence in Buchanan's administration. In 1859, the Kentucky General Assembly elected Breckinridge to a U.S. Senate term that would begin in 1861. In the 1860 presidential contest, he captured the electoral votes of most of the Southern states, but finished a distant second among four candidates. Lincoln's election as president prompted the secession of the Southern states to form the Confederate States of America. Though Breckinridge sympathized with the Southern cause, in the Senate he worked futilely to reunite the states peacefully. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War, he opposed allocating resources for Lincoln to fight the Confederacy. Fearing arrest after Kentucky sided with the Union, he fled to the Confederacy, joined the Confederate States Army, and was subsequently expelled from the Senate. He served in the Confederate Army from October 1861 to February 1865, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed him Confederate States Secretary of War. Concluding that the Confederate cause was hopeless, he encouraged Davis to negotiate a national surrender. Davis's capture in April, 1865 ended the war, and Breckinridge fled to Cuba, then Great Britain, and finally Canada, remaining in exile until President Andrew Johnson's offer of amnesty in 1868. Returning to Kentucky, he refused all requests to resume his political career and died of complications related to war injuries in 1875. ==Formative years== Historian James C. Klotter has speculated that, had John C. Breckinridge's father, Cabell, lived, he would have steered his son to the Whig Party and the Union, rather than the Democratic Party and the Confederacy, but the Kentucky Secretary of State and former Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives died of a fever on September 1, 1823, months before his son's third birthday.〔Klotter, pp. 96–97〕 Burdened with her husband's debts, widow Mary Breckinridge and her children moved to her in-laws' home near Lexington, Kentucky, where John C. Breckinridge's grandmother taught him the political philosophies of his late grandfather, U.S. Attorney General John Breckinridge.〔Klotter in ''The Breckinridges of Kentucky'', p. 97〕 John Breckinridge believed the federal government was created by, and subject to, the co-equal governments of the states.〔Klotter, p. 108〕 As a state representative, he introduced the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, which denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts and asserted that states could nullify them and other federal laws that they deemed unconstitutional.〔Heck, p. 1〕 A strict constructionist, he held that the federal government could only exercise powers explicitly given to it in the Constitution.〔 Most of the Breckinridges were Whigs, but John Breckinridge's posthumous influence inclined his grandson toward the Democratic Party.〔"John Cabell Breckinridge". ''Encyclopedia of World Biography''〕〔Klotter in ''The Breckinridges of Kentucky'', p. 103〕 Additionally, John C. Breckinridge's friend and law partner, Thomas W. Bullock, was from a Democratic family.〔Heck, pp. 11, 13〕 In 1842, Bullock told Breckinridge that by the time they opened their practice in Burlington, Iowa, "you were two-thirds of a Democrat"; living in heavily Democratic Iowa Territory further distanced him from Whiggery.〔Davis, p. 27〕 He wrote weekly editorials in the Democratic ''Iowa Territorial Gazette and Advisor'', and in February 1843, he was named to the Des Moines County Democratic committee.〔 A letter from Breckinridge's brother-in-law related that, when Breckinridge's uncle William learned that his nephew had "become loco-foco",〔"Loco-foco" was by then a derogatory term used by Whigs to describe the Democratic Party; see locofocos.〕 he said, "I felt as I would have done if I had heard that my daughter had been dishonored."〔Heck, p. 14〕 On a visit to Kentucky in 1843, Breckinridge met and married Mary Cyrene Burch, ending his time in Iowa.〔Heck, p. 15〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Political career of John C. 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